Lean into your emotions.

As a parent of a 20mo-old who is developing her verbal and emotional skills, I often find myself reading about toddler brain development.

This helps me put a lens of science and logic to the tantrums and power struggles that disrupt a day and are a huge source of frustration and exhaustion. Sometimes we expect her to be a robot and fall in line with the tasks of life, go to sleep on time, wake time, get in the car seat, and that we have some ultimate control over her with all our parenting strategies.

But really, she’s just tiny human learning her way in the world. She needs compassion through these big feelings, so she learns to trust herself, and trust us as her safe space. Tantrums are true bids for connection and understanding and ignoring them leaves her to carry her big feelings all alone.

As an adult female in the working world, I have found the workplace is not the place for full trust. To be professional means to button it up, check your feelings at the door, and please, oh please don’t ever cry. But with full-time work taking up approximately 60% of our waking hours, as our personal lives continue while we’re on the clock, it’s hard to keep up the emotionless task-rabbit focus required.

Work itself is a stressor, as we have deadlines, measurements of achievement, and many relationships to foster to make work successful. When I have cried at work, I felt embarrassment and shame, and I diminished my colleague’s professional opinion of me. I felt so isolated from showing my humanity.

Funny thing is that the support for both a developing toddler and an adult in the workplace is one and the same. In the 1970’s evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed Costly Signaling Theory in which “small acts of engagement, despite the inherent risks, have powerful effects since they are seen as having genuine intentions.”

Leaning into emotional cues, acknowledging them, and showing genuine concern for them, helps the person having the emotions feel seen and cared for which builds trust.

Organizational behaviorist Ph.D. candidate Alisa Yu and her coauthors Justin Berg and Julian Zlatev argue that workplace leaders need to keep the balance between being task-oriented and people-oriented. “A leader could very easily see someone in distress and choose to ignore it,” Yu says. “But only a leader who truly is benevolent and cares about employees would risk getting involved by voluntarily acknowledging the distressed employee. Thus, employees might take this as a signal that this leader is someone who can be trusted with their well-being.”’

We’re all humans who need connection and compassion no matter the environment. And whether you’re a leader in the workplace or a parent at home or a friend to a friend, emotional acknowledgment goes far to build trust and respect in relationships. When my toddler is in the midst of a tantrum, I stay with her and offer her options for comfort: Do you want a hug, to talk, or a quiet space? All those options sound pretty good to me as an adult too.

Source: Stanford Business–All the Feels: Why it Pays to Notice Emotions in the Workplace. 05.13.2021. By Theodore Kinni.